RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Libya and Egypt Are The Price of Ineptocracy

The events of yesterday, more than any scholarly paper, underscore the craven cowardice and geopolitical ineptness of the Obama Administration.

Far from being a surprise, the sacking of two of our embassies and the slaughter of our ambassador in Libya can be rightly described as the logical outcome of the feckless fascination this administration has had with any group of armed thugs who lay claim to being freedom fighters. In short, what happened was a feature of American foreign policy under Obama, not a bug.

What Obama has tried to do is create an aura of action and progress by glomming onto breaking events and trying to gain credit from them. There is no rhyme or reason in our foreign policy that cannot be adequately contained in the next State Department press release or by inserting Obama, in Kim Il-Sung fashion, into the lives of previous presidents.

When Barack Obama tacitly consented to the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak many thought this was a good idea. Mubarak, after all, represented the last generation of Arab strong men in the Egyptian tradition. His regime was repressive and the time was deemed right to nudge him out of the way before he could pass on the presidency to his son. Troubling, for a lot of us, was the fact that on one had a clue as to who would take over. But what was known was that the only viable political opposition was the terror connected Muslim Brotherhood. A group that is now feted at the White House.

The same situation applied in Libya. An aging and harmless dictator was ousted after a bloody and protracted civil war. This time the US actively aided the rebels despite numerous press reports that jihadis were coming home from around the globe to fight for the rebels. Our only stake in that fight that delivered the Libyan government to al-Qaeda and Libyan oil to Russian and France was apparently the thought that offing Qaddafi would be really neat and build Obama’s tough guy cred.

In neither case was the future of the Mediterranean rim a consideration, Obama and his ineptocrats were too busy basking in the soft afterglow of Arab Spring to worry about long term effects.

So today we mourn our dead. We look in shame on our burned embassies. And we remember that the administration that set this deadly sequence of events into motion wants four more years.